Search All Fields In All Tables For A Specific Value (Oracle)

Quote:

I've tried using this statement below to find an appropriate column based on what I think it should be named but it returned no results.*

SELECT * from dba_objects WHERE
object_name like '%DTN%'

A column isn't an object. If you mean that you expect the column name to be like '%DTN%', the query you want is:

SELECT owner, table_name, column_name FROM all_tab_columns WHERE column_name LIKE '%DTN%';

But if the 'DTN' string is just a guess on your part, that probably won't help.

By the way, how certain are you that '1/22/2008P09RR8' is a value selected directly from a single column? If you don't know at all where it is coming from, it could be a concatenation of several columns, or the result of some function, or a value sitting in a nested table object. So you might be on a wild goose chase trying to check every column for that value. Can you not start with whatever client application is displaying this value and try to figure out what query it is using to obtain it?

Anyway, diciu's answer gives one method of generating SQL queries to check every column of every table for the value. You can also do similar stuff entirely in one SQL session using a PL/SQL block and dynamic SQL. Here's some hastily-written code for that:

    SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE 100000

    DECLARE
      match_count INTEGER;
    BEGIN
      FOR t IN (SELECT owner, table_name, column_name
                  FROM all_tab_columns
                  WHERE owner <> 'SYS' and data_type LIKE '%CHAR%') LOOP

        EXECUTE IMMEDIATE
          'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ' || t.owner || '.' || t.table_name ||
          ' WHERE '||t.column_name||' = :1'
          INTO match_count
          USING '1/22/2008P09RR8';

        IF match_count > 0 THEN
          dbms_output.put_line( t.table_name ||' '||t.column_name||' '||match_count );
        END IF;

      END LOOP;

    END;
    /

There are some ways you could make it more efficient too.

In this case, given the value you are looking for, you can clearly eliminate any column that is of NUMBER or DATE type, which would reduce the number of queries. Maybe even restrict it to columns where type is like '%CHAR%'.

Instead of one query per column, you could build one query per table like this:

SELECT * FROM table1
  WHERE column1 = 'value'
     OR column2 = 'value'
     OR column3 = 'value'
     ...
     ;

Yes you can and your DBA will hate you and will find you to nail your shoes to the floor because that will cause lots of I/O and bring the database performance really down as the cache purges.

select column_name from all_tab_columns c, user_all_tables u where c.table_name = u.table_name;

for a start.

I would start with the running queries, using the v$session and the v$sqlarea. This changes based on oracle version. This will narrow down the space and not hit everything.

I was having following issues for @Lalit Kumars answer,

ORA-19202: Error occurred in XML processing
ORA-00904: "SUCCESS": invalid identifier
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_XMLGEN", line 288
ORA-06512: at line 1
19202. 00000 -  "Error occurred in XML processing%s"
*Cause:    An error occurred when processing the XML function
*Action:   Check the given error message and fix the appropriate problem

Solution is:

WITH  char_cols AS
  (SELECT /*+materialize */ table_name, column_name
   FROM   cols
   WHERE  data_type IN ('CHAR', 'VARCHAR2'))
SELECT DISTINCT SUBSTR (:val, 1, 11) "Searchword",
       SUBSTR (table_name, 1, 14) "Table",
       SUBSTR (column_name, 1, 14) "Column"
FROM   char_cols,
       TABLE (xmlsequence (dbms_xmlgen.getxmltype ('select "'
       || column_name
       || '" from "'
       || table_name
       || '" where upper("'
       || column_name
       || '") like upper(''%'
       || :val
       || '%'')' ).extract ('ROWSET/ROW/*') ) ) t
ORDER  BY "Table"
/ 

I modified Flood's script to execute once for each table rather than for every column of each table for faster execution. It requires Oracle 11g or greater.

    set serveroutput on size 100000

declare
    v_match_count integer;
    v_counter integer;

    -- The owner of the tables to search through (case-sensitive)
    v_owner varchar2(255) := 'OWNER_NAME';
    -- A string that is part of the data type(s) of the columns to search through (case-insensitive)
    v_data_type varchar2(255) := 'CHAR';
    -- The string to be searched for (case-insensitive)
    v_search_string varchar2(4000) := 'FIND_ME';

    -- Store the SQL to execute for each table in a CLOB to get around the 32767 byte max size for a VARCHAR2 in PL/SQL
    v_sql clob := '';
begin
    for cur_tables in (select owner, table_name from all_tables where owner = v_owner and table_name in 
                       (select table_name from all_tab_columns where owner = all_tables.owner and data_type like '%' ||  upper(v_data_type) || '%')
                       order by table_name) loop
        v_counter := 0;
        v_sql := '';

        for cur_columns in (select column_name from all_tab_columns where 
                            owner = v_owner and table_name = cur_tables.table_name and data_type like '%' || upper(v_data_type) || '%') loop
            if v_counter > 0 then
                v_sql := v_sql || ' or ';
            end if;
            v_sql := v_sql || 'upper(' || cur_columns.column_name || ') like ''%' || upper(v_search_string) || '%''';
            v_counter := v_counter + 1;
        end loop;

        v_sql := 'select count(*) from ' || cur_tables.table_name || ' where ' || v_sql;

        execute immediate v_sql
        into v_match_count;

        if v_match_count > 0 then
            dbms_output.put_line('Match in ' || cur_tables.owner || ': ' || cur_tables.table_name || ' - ' || v_match_count || ' records');
        end if;
    end loop;

    exception
        when others then
            dbms_output.put_line('Error when executing the following: ' || dbms_lob.substr(v_sql, 32600));
end;
/

I would do something like this (generates all the selects you need). You can later on feed them to sqlplus:

echo "select table_name from user_tables;" | sqlplus -S user/pwd | grep -v "^--" | grep -v "TABLE_NAME" | grep "^[A-Z]" | while read sw;
do echo "desc $sw" | sqlplus -S user/pwd | grep -v "\-\-\-\-\-\-" | awk -F' ' '{print $1}' | while read nw;
do echo "select * from $sw where $nw='val'";
done;
done;

It yields:

select * from TBL1 where DESCRIPTION='val'
select * from TBL1 where ='val'
select * from TBL2 where Name='val'
select * from TBL2 where LNG_ID='val'

And what it does is - for each table_name from user_tables get each field (from desc) and create a select * from table where field equals 'val'.

I don't of a simple solution on the SQL promprt. Howeve there are quite a few tools like toad and PL/SQL Developer that have a GUI where a user can input the string to be searched and it will return the table/procedure/object where this is found.

I found the best solution but it's a little slow. (It will work perfectly with all SQL IDE's.)

SELECT DISTINCT table_name, column_name, data_type
  FROM user_tab_cols,
  TABLE (xmlsequence (dbms_xmlgen.getxmltype ('select '
  || column_name
  || ' from '
  || table_name
  || ' where lower('
  || column_name
  || ') like lower(''%'
  || 'your_text_here'
  || '%'')' ).extract ('ROWSET/ROW/*') ) ) a
  where table_name not in (
    select distinct table_name
      from user_tab_cols where data_type like 'SDO%'
      or data_type like '%LOB') AND DATA_TYPE = 'VARCHAR2'
  order by table_name, column_name;

Borrowing, slightly enhancing and simplifying from this Blog post the following simple SQL statement seems to do the job quite well:

SELECT DISTINCT (:val) "Search Value", TABLE_NAME "Table", COLUMN_NAME "Column"
FROM cols,
     TABLE (XMLSEQUENCE (DBMS_XMLGEN.GETXMLTYPE(
       'SELECT "' || COLUMN_NAME || '" FROM "' || TABLE_NAME || '" WHERE UPPER("'
       || COLUMN_NAME || '") LIKE UPPER(''%' || :val || '%'')' ).EXTRACT ('ROWSET/ROW/*')))
ORDER BY "Table";

The Oracle LIKE condition allows wildcards to be used in the WHERE clause of a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement.

%: to match any string of any length

Eg-

SELECT last_name
   FROM   customer_tab
   WHERE  last_name LIKE '%A%';

-: to match on a single character

Eg-

SELECT last_name
   FROM   customer_tab
   WHERE  last_name LIKE 'A_t';